Ursula K. Le Guin
1929–2018
Le Guin’s work provides the deepest framing for what Thistlebridge is trying to do. Not a blueprint — she would have hated that — but a way of seeing.
Seeds, Not Solutions
The instinct is to ask: how do we solve the crisis of meaning in modern life?
Le Guin’s framing would be different: what would we want to exist in a thousand years, and what can we do now toward that?
This shift matters. A solution implies a problem that can be fixed, a blueprint that can be followed, a destination that can be reached. Seeds are different. You can’t know which will sprout. You can only know whether they’re living things with growth in them — or sterile replicas that look like seeds but won’t take.
The Kesh and the City of Mind
In Always Coming Home (1985), Le Guin imagines a far-future California where our civilization has collapsed and been forgotten. The Kesh people who live there aren’t following a plan left by their ancestors. They’re making something from what they inherited — which is mostly broken things and a living landscape.
The Kesh have access to a vast computer network called the City of Mind. They’re not anti-technology. They’re selective. The network exists to serve human purposes without colonizing human life. They use it sparingly, for specific things, when needed.
This is selective-technology — the practice Thistlebridge tries to embody.
The Carrier Bag
In her essay “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” (1986), Le Guin argues against the Hero narrative — the story of the mammoth-hunter who kills the beast and returns triumphant. She proposes instead the story of the gatherer, whose tools are bags and baskets, whose work is accumulation and arrangement rather than conquest.
“It is a strange realism, but it is a strange reality.”
The daily note as container for fragments. The knowledge base as carrier bag. Patient gathering of what might be useful.
Ambiguity as Commitment
The Dispossessed (1974) is subtitled “An Ambiguous Utopia.” Is Anarres a success or a failure? Both. Is technology liberating or constraining? Yes. Is Shevek a hero or a fool? The question misses the point.
Le Guin was suspicious of bigness. She understood that scale changes the nature of things — a village council and a national government are not the same thing writ large and small, but fundamentally different creatures.
She would remind us: distrust anyone — including yourself — who’s too sure they know what human life is supposed to consist of. Keep asking. Don’t stop being surprised.
Key Works
- The Dispossessed (1974)
- Always Coming Home (1985)
- “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” (1986)
- Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching — her rendering (1997)
- Dancing at the Edge of the World — essays (1989)
Connections
- appropriate-technology — her fiction embodies this
- selective-technology — the Kesh relationship with the City of Mind
- anarchism — Anarres as thought experiment
- taoism — explicit influence, especially in later work
- Ivan Illich — parallel critique of institutions
- E.F. Schumacher — parallel critique of scale
The carrier bag holds what you’ve gathered. Some of it will be useful; some won’t. The usefulness can’t be determined in advance. Keep gathering.